Italy

Another 930,000 European merchants will soon accept Alipay mobile payments at the point of sale, following partnerships between the company and some of Europe’s largest financial institutions and payment service providers. The Ant Financial-owned firm… More

Fully flexible NFC antennas made from graphene could match the performance of conventional metallic antennas, making connected wearable devices cheaper and more energy-efficient, a consortium backed by the European Commission says. Researchers from the Graphene… More

Swedish mobile payments specialist Seamless’ Seqr mobile payment platform has launched a P2P money transfer service that enables users to instantly transfer money to each other “regardless of where they are in the world”, the company says. The service is being rolled out to 14 countries across Europe: Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the UK.

Customers of Serbia’s Banca Intesa — a subsidiary of Italian banking group Intesa Sanpaolo — have become the first in the Balkan country to be able to make host card emulation (HCE) based mobile payments,… More

PayPal has enabled money transfers via Apple’s Siri voice command function, enabling users with iOS10 devices to make payments by speaking requests. The function will be available in 30 countries. “PayPal users can now send… More

PARTNER NEWS: Customers of Italian retail bank Intesa Sanpaolo can now receive their PIN codes through SMS or via the web, without having to wait for postal delivery. The bank is using digital security giant… More

One fifth of German millennials (21%), more than a third of Dutch millennials (36%) and Italian millennials (37%) and a quarter of UK millennials (25%) are now making mobile payments in-store, online and in-app, research… More

Some 54% of European consumers are using a mobile device to make payments for a range of activities in-store, in-app and online, compared to 18% at this time last year, Visa’s 2016 Digital Payments Study… More

More than three in five European consumers (62%) believe using biometric forms of payment authentication will be faster and easier than passwords and PINs, research by Visa reveals, with 42% believing that the procedure could completely… More

Swedish mobile payment specialist Seamless has launched its Seqr mobile payment platform in Austria, Ireland, Malta and Luxembourg. “The company’s rapid expansion means that consumers can now use Seqr to make payments in 16 countries,” the company says. Seqr is already available in Sweden, Finland, Romania, Belgium, Portugal, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, the UK and the US.

Customers of Vodafone Italia can now make NFC mobile payments through PayPal using the mobile network operator’s Vodafone Wallet. The service will allow for in-store payments at any Visa contactless terminal across the country. More

Italian consumers are now piloting in-store mobile payments using Jiffy, the person-to-person (P2P) payment service launched by payment processor SIA in October 2014. The service makes use of QR codes at the point of sale. More

Istituto Centrale delle Banche Popolari Italiane (ICBPI) is to establish an instant payments solution in the first quarter of 2017 in partnership with Danish payment services provider Nets. “Based on the very successful implementation of Nets RealTime24/7 solution in Denmark, the ICBPI’s instant payment platform will serve the Italian Payment Service Providers (PSPs),” Nets says. “There will be no limit to the use cases but the focus will be on mobile payments, initially targeting P2P payments.”

Italian payments solutions provider Payment Technologies (Paytec) is to build a new mobile payment technology into its vending machines that will let consumers make contactless payments using colour-coded light signals and tokenisation. More

More than 300,000 Italians have registered to use P2P payment service Jiffy since it was launched by payment processor SIA in October 2014. “The average value of a single transaction is €44 and around 50% of the transfers are for sums under €25,” SIA says. “23 bank groups, of which four since the beginning of 2016, have subscribed to SIA’s P2P payment service since its launch on the Italian market. Once all the banks are active, the service will therefore be accessible by over 32m Italian current accounts, equal to around 80% of the total.”

Vodafone Wallet users in Europe will soon be able to make NFC mobile payments at stores, restaurants and other retail locations using their PayPal accounts. The agreement between the online payments provider and Vodafone marks the… More

Travellers passing through Bologna Airport in Italy will soon be able to download the airport’s mobile app by tapping NFC tags or scanning QR codes with their mobile phone. They will then get notifications via Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons installed by platform provider Connecthings. “Orientation in the airport can be now greatly, simply facilitated using the mobile devices everybody’s using,” says Bologna Airport’s Silvia Lombardi.

PARTNER NEWS: Leading bottle cap supplier Guala Closures Group is working with chip maker NXP to develop NFC-enabled closures for wine and spirit bottles that will allow consumers to check the product’s authenticity and whether or not the beverage has been tampered with. More